


The Second Time Around

by likehandlingroses



Series: Awfully Sweet [3]
Category: Downton Abbey
Genre: Fluff and Angst, M/M, World War II, grown up children
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-21
Updated: 2019-12-21
Packaged: 2021-02-26 17:55:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21892531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/likehandlingroses/pseuds/likehandlingroses
Summary: As the children at Downton grow, Thomas begins feel as if he’s living the same things over again.Good and bad, they show him where he’s been...and how far he’s come.
Relationships: Thomas Barrow & George Crawley, Thomas Barrow & Marigold Crawley, Thomas Barrow & Sybbie Branson, Thomas Barrow/Richard Ellis
Series: Awfully Sweet [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1569157
Comments: 47
Kudos: 349





	The Second Time Around

**1939**

They’d decided to go through with it all again.

Twenty years ago, Thomas would have grimly supposed it was inevitable they someday would. Wars wouldn’t start unless someone benefitted, which meant there’d be more where that came from, soon as someone figured they could stand to win something. 

Time had softened Thomas into thinking better of the world. Not enough to believe war was behind them, but enough to believe he’d seen the worst of it already. Surely, people had learned enough to keep their hands sober and steady for at least another century. The people in later times would forget and make the same mistakes...but Thomas felt sure a world that still remembered The War would pause before pursuing such costly measures again. 

What a mistake that belief had been...it meant what was to come would hurt twice as much. 

The details didn’t matter, though it seemed all anyone wanted to talk about over dinners and in drawing rooms—and the arguments that ensued took Thomas back to a time he wished he could forget, a time when everyone and everything was scared and small and desperately unhappy: 

“He won’t be sent abroad, not right away. Not when he’s so young.”

“Is that much comfort, when they’re preparing England to be a war zone?”

“That doesn’t mean it _will_ be.”

“It must be easy for you to be cheery about it. Little Bertie safe and sound for another seven years…he’ll be just fine, unless we’re all of us blown to bits—”

“ _Really,_ Mary!”

Thomas breathed a sigh of relief when such tea times were over. It was all hot air, anyway. Distractions from the truth.

Where George was going, who he’d be under, who he might know...they spoke endlessly about such matters because they didn’t understand what it all meant. What war really was, when you tore away the trappings and strategies and initiatives. The shouted, threadbare reasonings, and the cruel realities behind them. It all came to the same end, in any case. 

George could be off to the moon, and it wouldn’t make any difference. Even if he made it through, he’d never be the same. 

How they could ask more young people to tear themselves apart in such a way, Thomas didn’t know. But they’d done it, and now it was the world’s job to decide if it could bear it all again. 

He didn’t think it could. But then, he’d been wrong before. 

George poked his head into the pantry. 

“Mr. Barrow?”

Thomas stood, avoiding the young man’s stare. 

“Milord...I had Roger send up the tea,” he said, pinning on a smile and keeping a close eye on the top corner of the open door. “He didn’t get lost again, did he?”

“No, no,” George said distractedly. “Only I...well.”

Silence fell, and Thomas waited desperately for George to finish his thought. None of his own were any use—they were soft and silly and sentimental, and that was the last thing the poor boy needed now. 

He straightened about the shoulders. “Is there anything you need from me, mi—”

“—you don’t have to keep calling me that,” George interrupted. “I suppose you’ll have to at dinners and things, just so there’s not a fuss...for your sake more than mine...but I’m not...all that. Not really.”

Which wasn’t true, but George could be forgiven for not feeling like an Earl of anything when he was hardly eighteen and still mourning the loss of his grandfather. 

And now this...

“What should I call you?”

George blinked—perhaps he’d expected a protest, an explanation of what was proper—but his answer was steady, even proud: 

“I’ve always been George, and I don’t see why it’d change now.”

George had always resembled his father—people had commented on it since he was small. But just now, Thomas _felt_ it more powerfully than he ever had before. 

George was getting awfully close in age to the young man Mr. Crawley had been when they first met, and it showed in his bearing. 

“If that’s what you wish…” 

George nodded. His eyes moved to the distant corner of the room. 

“Is everything settled for the dinner tomorrow?”

“It is.”

“Good. That’s good.” George blinked a few times before looking up. “Mr. Barrow?”

Thomas met his eyes, his stomach twisting at the anxiety in George’s voice. “Yes?”

“Do you think they’ll be terribly angry if I don’t come down for it?”

“For the dinner, you mean?”

“Only, I...I don’t know if I can manage it,” George said, looking at Thomas imploringly. “I might be able to. I’ll try. But I don’t know if I can face it.”

Thomas swallowed back the pain that threatened to spill over into his voice. It was all so terribly _unfair_ …

But George didn’t rely on him for pulling sad faces and lamenting the state of the world, so he’d have to bear up, for George’s sake. 

“Well, if you can’t, you can’t,” he said, holding his posture tighter with each word. “And the world’ll have keep on turning. Mrs. Steele will be sorry you’ll miss all the dishes she made special, but I don’t suppose she understands the weight of it all.”

George was pale, but his gaze hadn’t strayed from Thomas. “But you do.”

Thomas took a breath before answering. 

“I do. And I think most people must have forgotten, to have decided to go through with it all again.”

George looked down at the floor, this time at a spot directly in front of his feet. 

“I would be miserable if I didn’t go, I know that,” he said softly. “But I’m afraid. Not of dying, so much. But what it all means for the world...I thought things would go a certain way in my life, and now I know they won’t.”

Why did he have to be so clever and thoughtful? It’d be easier if he could go to war like most of them did—confident and brash...a well-intentioned fool. 

“No, I don’t suppose they will,” Thomas admitted. “But that would have been true in any case, if you don’t mind my saying so. And it may turn out all right.”

Though he still looked miserable as anything behind the eyes, George smiled. 

“You sound like Mr. Ellis.”

Thomas warmed at the thought of Richard. He’d be down from York, tomorrow. And a good thing, too: Thomas didn’t know how he’d bear it all alone. 

“I’m glad—he’s much better at these things than I am.”

In kinder days, George would have protested this. But today, his mind was already off somewhere else, and the silence between them returned as he puzzled his way back into the room. 

“Do you really think it might turn out fine?” he asked, fixing Thomas with a look of flickering hope. 

“Fine?” Thomas shook his head. “No. The world’s never been fine. We can’t seem to manage that. But it might find itself right-side-up again, and there’s no reason you should despair of seeing that day.”

George nodded. 

“I hope you’re right.”

“I’ve been known to be, from time to time.” This smile felt less forced than the first. “Do you want to know what I’d do, about dinner?”

George stepped forward. “Please.”

“It’s all family anyway, so I’d have it laid out in the drawing room, let people come and go,” Thomas said. “You won’t be the only one itching to run up to your room, and if everyone feels they can move as they please...well, they’ll be more likely to stay together longer.”

It was a poor substitute for what George really needed, but he brightened nonetheless. 

“Of course, that’s what we’ll do! That’ll take the weight off, some. It won’t cause too much trouble down here?”

Thomas shook his head. “It’ll be nothing at all to arrange. Leave it to me.”

George beamed. “Thank you, Mr. Barrow. You always know how to sort things. I’ll go and tell Mother.”

Thomas braced himself for the lecture he was going to get when Lady Mary made her way down...she’d relent once he explained. None of them wanted anything more than to make George happy before he set off. 

Though it’d be impertinent to say, Thomas knew he could manage the task as well as anyone. 

And there _was_ one more thing he could do...one more thing that might have a prayer’s chance of easing his worries. 

“M—...George?” 

George spun on his heel, staring at him with a wide-eyed expectation. Thomas blanched, but kept on with it before he lost his nerve (or the tight hold he had on his tear ducts). 

“When you’re over there, you’re going to feel things that seem silly,” he said. “And then you’re going to want to write them down and send them out, and that’ll feel even sillier. But you do it anyway, all right? If you can’t send them to anyone else, you must promise you’ll send them to me. Because I’ll understand what you mean.” 

For a moment—standing straight as an arrow in the doorway—George looked more like Mr. Matthew than ever before. Then his face crushed in on itself, and he was Master George again—five years old and easy to scoop out of any trouble. 

“I will, Mr. Barrow,” he promised, as Thomas did the best he could with a steady arm round his shoulders and a clean handkerchief. “I will, thank you for...well, you’ve always been so good to me, and I...I will write, Mr. Barrow. I promise.”

And if he kept his promise, Thomas felt they both might be able to bear it after all. 

It didn’t matter where George was going, so long as he came back from time to time.

* * *

**1940**

“So Lady Hexham’s told her at last. Just before they left Brancaster, it seems…” 

“...but she must have guessed by now…”

“...apparently not…”

The hushed chatter between the maids stopped as Thomas came into view, and they scattered under the harshness of his stare.

Not fifteen minutes later, Miss Marigold tumbled downstairs in a daze. In no time at all, Thomas had her in Mrs. Hughes’ old sitting room with a cup of tea tight in her hands.

“Did you know, Mr. Barrow?” She didn’t look up from the tea in her cup. 

Thomas blinked. “It was none of my business.”

Marigold looked up at him. “But did you?”

She already knew the answer, of course. The test was in whether Thomas would tell her the truth. 

“I suspected…” he admitted. “Only because you’re so like Lady Hexham, and it seemed—”

“—obvious,” Marigold sighed. 

“—tidy,” Thomas said. “I thought she’d wait to tell you until you were a bit older.”

Of course, Marigold was very near a proper young lady, now...but if they’d kept her in the dark this long, Thomas wasn’t sure he’d have chosen _seventeen_ as the age to be revealing family secrets...it was a beastly enough time without that. Especially with a war on.

“I made her,” Marigold said glumly. “She’s been crying so much since the war started, and whenever she cries I get a stomachache—I should have realized there was a reason for that. And I asked her why...and she told me some story about a man she knew who’d been killed years ago in Germany by the Brownshirts—”

“—Mr. Gregson.”

Marigold looked at him with wide eyes. She hadn’t realized, then, that he knew quite that much. 

“Did you know him?”

“Not very well,” Thomas said. “But I’ve heard nothing except how decent he was. Clever, too. And brave, I imagine, to have angered the people he did.”

Marigold’s eyes were trained on him, grasping at every word. 

“He and Lady Hexham seemed well suited,” Thomas finished, hoping it meant something for him to say so. 

“That’s what she said.” Marigold’s voice wavered. “And then the story was over, but my stomachache hadn’t gone away, and I knew it was because she hadn’t told me everything. So I asked again, and this time she did. Tell me everything, I mean.”

In spite of himself, Thomas grinned. 

“She’s always been good about getting to the point of things…” he said. Marigold smiled sadly into her tea. “How do you feel about it all?”

She considered the question with the kind of care only Marigold could summon. If she was so careful and contemplative at seventeen...she’d be one of those village sages by thirty.

“I don’t know,” she finally admitted. “I haven’t worked it all out just yet. I might not be able to.”

“No,” Thomas murmured. “How could you?”

It came out more severe than he’d meant, but Marigold appeared too lost in thought to pay him much mind. 

“Mostly I’m sad,” she said. “And I still have a stomachache.”

Thomas leaned back in his chair, brow furrowed. “Have you told Lady Hexham?”

Marigold shook her head. “I couldn’t...it would make her feel so badly. She didn’t do anything wrong.”

“And neither did you,” Thomas pressed. “Don’t keep it all knotted up inside, Miss Marigold. It won’t do you any good in there. And Lady Hexham’s made of sterner stuff than you give her credit for.”

Marigold conceded his point with a cautious smile, though it flitted away as she fell back into contemplation. Thomas let her ponder, picking up his own tea cup and saucer as he waited.

The question finally came: 

“Do you think it’ll always have to be a secret?” 

Thomas wished he could he pretend to know anything about the world they were living in now. 

“I don’t know. I hope not.”

A useless answer, but it sparked something in Marigold. 

“It feels so ridiculous, that people have to keep secrets about things that aren’t anyone else’s concern,” she said, leaning forward in her chair. “She told me Lord Hexham’s always known, since they were married. And his mother knew, and Little Bertie and Mabel will know when they’re a bit older. Everyone here knows. What does it matter, if we all know and it’s no trouble? What could anyone else have to say about it?”

The speech—a bubbling over, perhaps, of some the things that had caused poor Marigold’s stomachache—carried through the room with a resonance that caught Thomas off guard. 

“Nothing of any use, that’s for certain,” he managed. 

Marigold nodded. 

“Do you feel like that with Mr. Ellis?”

Thomas’s heart dropped into his stomach. Marigold didn’t look at all embarrassed by the question, which somehow made it more unnerving. 

When had she been told? And who had done the telling? 

“I...yes, I suppose I do,” he said, feeling breathless. “Though I didn’t realize you had been told about all that…”

Marigold sat back, mouth wide open. 

“Oh, I’m sorry! Only, I thought you _must_ have seen me...I saw the two of you kissing when I was about ten, and I was awfully clumsy about sneaking away. I thought you knew.”

It was Thomas’s turn to stare into his cup. 

“I didn’t,” he murmured, quietly relieved that no one had broken his trust, even as he berated himself for not being more careful. 

“Are you upset?” 

Thomas managed a smile. “Not if you aren’t.”

“Of course I’m not!” Marigold grinned at him. “Lord Hexham had a cousin who was that sort.”

“Now, how did you find _that_ out?” Thomas said with a laugh. It seemed Brancaster provided just as much intrigue as Downton, when it came to it. 

Marigold didn’t laugh. “There was an article in the newspaper about homosexuals, and I asked Lord Hexham what it meant.”

“Of course you did...” Thomas said fondly. She was her mother’s daughter, and now she’d always know it. Whatever else happened, the world wouldn’t take that from her. 

“I’ve never told anyone,” Marigold said. “About you. Though I suppose it’s something like with me, isn’t it? Where most people know already?”

He wouldn’t admit it to most, but he’d admit it to Miss Marigold. 

“I believe so, yes.”

She grinned. “It’s awfully silly for everyone to go on that way, Mr. Barrow.”

“It is,” he agreed. “But we’ll have to manage. Shall I fetch you another cup, Miss Marigold?” 

* * *

**1946**

Now the war was over, Thomas didn’t think he was being ungracious in thinking the government could hurry up with moving them back to some semblance of sanity. 

They said the poor of England had never been more nutritionally sound since introducing the ration books. Thomas supposed it wasn’t worth suggesting they use that knowledge past wartime…the nation’s goodwill and sense of austerity would dry up soon enough. 

They might as well get back to letting people snatch up as much bacon as they could. 

As it was, Miss Sybbie would be getting married on a hurried Saturday morning, two hours after Mr. Harold Dryden arrived at the house...and Thomas and Mrs. Steele had only managed an average luncheon at best. 

Carson would be rolling over in his grave, and Thomas himself had to admit he was mortified—though he placated himself about the comparison by insisting that _he_ didn’t care one whit what any of the guests thought or how the _house_ came off. 

But Sybbie should have been married with a better showing than _this._

He watched her face in trepidation as she scanned the foyer while hurrying down the stairs. It was nothing like the old days, when Lady Mary or Lady Edith had been getting married. All those flowers, hanging off of everything, drooping in the humidity caused by the crowd of guests. 

But nearly all the old flower beds were filled with carrots and parsnips and the like, so pickings were scarce. He’d done all he could with some of the old decorations—you still couldn’t get anything new, hardly, not for this size of a house—but it was a poor display, compared to what she deserved. 

“Oh, this is perfect, Mr. Barrow,” she said breathlessly. “Just perfect. And—”

Her eyes landed on the small bouquet of white roses on one of the tables. Sometimes, if the light was right, they almost looked to hold a hint of blue. 

A mainstay of the old Dowager’s roses, and one of Sybbie’s very favorites since she was small. 

“I thought they took all those bushes out for the vegetable gardens,” she breathed, stepping forward to take one of the buds in hand. 

“They did.” Thomas bit back a grin at the success of the surprise. “But managed to sneak one away, which I hope you’ll forgive me for…it’s safe in York.”

Safe against a fence in the yard of a small house that would be his, once he decided he was finished with being a butler. A house he stole away to as often as he could, now that Dick lived in York and had taken up working with his brother and sister. 

The Ellises stuck together in times of hardship—which meant a ponderous pool of talent and savvy was at their disposal. Thomas supposed few families had done so well in building something from the shambles of the last decade. Something that would last into the years to come. 

The days of service were at their tattered end, and it was up to Thomas to decide when to make a clean break of it. He hadn’t decided just yet...but watching Sybbie standing there in her best white skirt and cardigan, looking more grown-up than she ever had before, made Thomas think it wouldn’t be long, now. 

“They’re beautiful.” Sybbie beamed at him, and Thomas wondered if she could possibly know how much it meant that she looked at him with such fondness. 

“Then everything’s as it should be.”

She blinked rather quickly, turning back to the flowers with a quick, shaking sigh. 

“You’re such a dear to us,” she murmured. 

It wouldn’t do for them to start crying before the service, before Mr. Dryden had even arrived...Thomas kept a shaking hold on the lump in his own throat before hazarding a dubious look. 

“Don’t say that before you’ve had luncheon…”

She laughed, shaking her head and looking for all the world like Lady Sybil. 

“Oh, don’t go on as if you haven’t pulled something perfect together,” she said, stepping forward. “I know you.”

And so she did, better than most, as she proved with her next question:

“Is Mr. Ellis coming?”

“Not until this evening, I’m afraid. He couldn’t get off at such short notice.”

“Of course not.” She’d be disappointed by it—they were terribly fond of each other—but Sybbie never showed such things. If he hadn’t known Lady Sybil, Thomas would have sworn no one on this earth had ever had such a dauntless spirit. 

“But he sends his best, to you and Mr. Dryden.”

“I suppose I’ll have to be Mrs. Dryden, now…” Sybbie said, scrunching up her nose. “I shouldn’t say so, but it’s not a pretty name.” 

“I don’t agree,” Thomas said. “But if you’d rather stay a Branson, I don’t suppose there’s anyone who could stop you.”

He didn’t think he imagined Sybbie’s glance at the ceiling. 

“Oh, they’d try…”

“More’s the pity for them.”

Sybbie hadn’t rushed to hug him with such fervency in well over ten years, clasping him tight about the neck as she laughed at his astonished “oh!” 

“Don’t you rush out after the service!” she said as she pulled away, taking his hand. “I want to introduce you to...oh, don’t look at me like that!”

For Thomas must have appeared less than enthusiastic at being paraded around while luncheon went to shambles. 

“I wasn’t,” he insisted. “Only, there’s a thousand things to do, and I don’t want anyone telling tales that I’m not up to snuff.”

“No one would dare,” she said, squeezing his hand. “Well, you’ll have to come up and meet them, then. Once it’s settled. Don’t tell me that’s not how it works, Mr. Barrow. It’s my wedding, and I say it does, for today.”

He couldn’t protest even if he wanted to—and he didn’t, really. If she wanted to show him off...well, that just went to show, didn’t it? She was the sweetest person in the whole world, and he’d landed in her good graces. 

He might as well bask in it, from time to time. 

“Sybbie!” Caroline called, tumbling down the stairs. “Mr. Dryden’s arrived, I saw the car pull up!”

“Oh!” Sybbie dropped Thomas’s hand, as she needed both hands to reflexively fuss with her hair. “I hope Violet’s finished with my hat…” 

She made it halfway to the first step before turning back to him with a warm smile. 

“You’re lovely for helping.”

“I’m happy to. Ms. _Branson_.”

She raised a delighted eyebrow, trotting up several steps before turning back once more. 

“Don’t hide all day!” she called down to him. “I’m asking especially, so you have to say yes!”

She said it with an air that suggested she knew he would. 

And—of course—she was right. 

* * *

**1947**

Miss Caroline settled into the chair across from Thomas in his sitting room, taking an overlarge bite of her biscuit. What would Mr. Carson say, Thomas mused each time she visited—plopping down without pretense, as if they were old friends.

Lady Mary’s daughter, a guest in the house he shared with another man…(though that was all neat and tidy and perfectly discreet, with an explanation for any question).

Miss Caroline knew about Mr. Ellis, too...had since the middle of the war at least...Mr. Carson would have had a fit. 

Once, he laughed to himself about it, and Miss Caroline had asked what on earth he meant by it. When he’d timidly explained himself—as delicately as he could manage—Caroline hadn’t held back:

“Oh, if I have to hear one more thing about _Carson_...he was never nice to you. I remember that, Mr. Barrow. One Christmas—it was after Violet came along, she had a bow in a little tuft of hair, and I took it for a bracelet—and while I was hiding in the corner with it, I heard him talking...and I couldn’t tell you what about, but I remember ‘ _Mr. Barrow_ this, and _Mr. Barrow_ that…’ And I knew what he meant! He thought I was too little to notice...or maybe too little to take sides. But I did.”

Thomas wasn’t about to argue with that...

“It’s good of you to come,” he said, offering Caroline another biscuit in the wake of her devouring her first. She sighed in impatience. 

“You always say that, and I always tell you that I _like_ coming. I felt so beastly for missing you last week—”

“—I didn’t tell you I’d be in London—”

“—and you ought to have!” she insisted. “I’d have come earlier in the week.”

“Your board meetings are always on Thursday,” Thomas said evenly. “There’s no need for you to make the trip to York twice.”

She picked up her tea spoon with a scoff. “Because I’m so _terribly_ busy…”

“Young ladies your age are always busy,” Thomas quipped. Busier than ever, it seemed...the war had pushed women front and center, and Miss Caroline and Violet were expected to know and do twice what the Crawley daughters had at their age. “You can’t fool me; I know you’ve better things to do than visit me.”

Her stirring slowed even as a sad smile played on her face. 

“Would you feel sorry for me if I said I really and truly don’t?”

Thomas raised an eyebrow. 

“No suitors?”

“Oh, _those_ …” Caroline dropped her spoon and sat back in her seat. “None worth talking over. Is Mr. Ellis out today?”

“He’s working, but he’ll be back soon enough.” He _should_ have been back in time for tea, but Thomas had learned not to expect such promptness from Dick. Not for something like tea. 

“I’m terribly envious of you,” Caroline said. “Everything settled and happy.”

Lady Mary’s daughter, envious of _him_...the world did turn in strange ways, sometimes...

“It took a tale or twelve to get there,” he said with a smile. “You’ve hardly started.”

Caroline very nearly rolled her eyes—Lady Mary could have been sitting before him. 

“That’s a cheerful thought...I feel ancient.”

If he squinted, he could remember a time he’d felt just the same way, when he’d been as young as her. 

“That’ll pass.”

“Do you promise, Mr. Barrow?” she said, a plea in her voice. 

“I promise,” he said, feeling reasonably certain it wasn’t a lie. At any rate, it satisfied Caroline, who sat straighter in her chair, her chin up. 

“I feel sometimes as if you’re the only person in the world who’ll be honest with me about these things,” she said. “Georgie won’t—he’s a dear, but he’d sooner eat nails than make me feel badly about anything, even if I should. And my mother and I are too alike to tell each other the truth. Violet’s still a girl. Sybbie might help, but she’s always off somewhere, and I’m scared of her, to tell you the truth; she’s so terribly nice, you know, and I’ll never measure up. So it’s down to you, I’m afraid.”

There’d be plenty up at the house who’d consider mentoring Miss Caroline a dubious honor indeed, but Thomas had always known how to handle her. It was probably why she liked him best...Thomas didn’t mind feeling smug over it, not when they all wrote her off before bothering to know who she was. 

They’d missed out, then, hadn’t they? 

“I’ll do my best, Miss Caroline.”

The words didn’t appear to comfort her. She took a sip of tea, her brow furrowed, before speaking a bit too loudly for the size of the room: 

“I shouldn’t have said what I did before—about being envious. I am, rather, but it sounds indelicate to say when you’re as lucky as I’ve been in life.”

“I’ve been lucky, too, in my own way.”

“Still.” Thomas noticed that Caroline’s tea cup was shaking a bit in her hands. “I know we aren’t what you really wanted.”

Thomas swallowed. 

“How d’you mean?”

He knew exactly what she meant, and what’s more, he shouldn’t have made the poor girl say it. But Caroline was tough, and she took the challenge of the question head on. 

“We couldn’t have wanted more than you gave us,” she said. “But we were a second choice to what you might have had, if the world was fair.”

Thomas didn’t know what to say to that. He couldn’t very well tell her it was true—he wasn’t even sure it _was_ true, really. He’d never been given a proper choice. So what did he know about choosing?

Even still, he knew he couldn’t say it _wasn’t_ true, either. 

“And I hope that we were a worthwhile second choice,” Caroline continued. “I hope that we made you happy, after all, but I know that’s what we were. A second choice.”

He knew, now, why she rankled at him thanking her for coming to visit, why she’d asked him to write when he wouldn’t be in. She was trying to make up for the sins of the rest of the world, when she’d been one of the sunniest parts of it. 

And wasn’t that just like Miss Caroline, ever since she was small? 

Just like that, Thomas knew what to say. 

“Second or fifth or three hundredth...it’s what was real,” he said softly. “You can always think up something better, but only the real things are any use.”

She understood what he meant—Miss Caroline didn’t hide her feelings as well as she thought she did. 

“You’re right, of course. You always are.” She beamed at him. “Perhaps that’s why this is one of the only bits of the week I look forward to...I’m so certain of every part. And I’m so fond of all of it...”

“I am, too,” Thomas said, as the front door creaked open. Dick entered, hat in hand, his grey hair neat and unbothered as usual (he never _looked_ late...there was something in that, Thomas supposed). 

“There he is…” Thomas grumbled, a smile on his face. “It’s about time...”

“It’s four, isn’t it?” Dick said as he took off his coat. They both glanced at the clock, which read a quarter past the hour.

“Well, just about,” Dick said with an affable grin that had always made Thomas forgive him most anything. 

He’d made peace long ago that he’d fallen in love with a saunterer and a lingerer. It even had its advantages—he saw more of the world, with Dick slowing his pace up some. The world improved with more breathing space added in.

He’d learned _some_ things, then, after all these years…

And as Miss Caroline stood to help him with making more hot water (“I _do_ know how to work a kettle, Mr. Barrow!”), it occurred to him that he’d done some teaching of his own, as well.

And what would the old guard at Downton have said about _that,_ he wondered? 


End file.
